Intercourse (25 page)

Aside from the disingenuous use of so-called privacy as a means of protecting the active sexual dominance of men over others, intercourse is, in essence and in reality, social, not private.

Intercourse both presumes and requires a society of at least two persons before it can occur at all; and the state is concerned about the nature of that society—how it is constructed, that it be hierarchical, that it be male-dominant. In each act of intercourse, a society is formed; and the distribution of power in that society is the state interest at stake. Who constitutes the society, what each does, the place of each in each act, the value of each, is what the state seeks to control. Gender is what the state seeks to control: who is the man here? which is the woman? how to keep the man on top, how to keep the man the man; how to render the woman inferior in fucking so that she cannot recover herself from the carnal experience of her own subjugation.

Intercourse is supposed to be natural and in it a man and a woman are supposed to show and do what each is by nature. Society justifies its civil subordination of women by virtue of what it articulates as the “natural” roles of men and women in intercourse; the “natural” subjugation of women to men in the act. God and nature are not enemies in this argument; divine law and sociobiologists, for instance, agree on the general rightness of male dominance. Nature, however, cannot be counted on. Women do not know how to be women exactly; men constantly fail to be men. The rules governing intercourse protect errant human beings from the failures of their own natures. “Natural” women and “natural” men do not, alas, on their own, always meet the mark. Nature and pleasure do not always coincide. Male dominance is not always so certain or so easy. Women not natural enough resent the presumption of natural inferiority. Law steps in where nature fails: virtually everywhere. Laws create nature—a male nature and a female nature and natural intercourse—by telling errant, unnatural human beings what to do and what not to do to protect and express their real nature—the real male, the real female, the real hierarchy that nature or God created putting man on top. Society makes laws that say who will put what where when; and though folks keep getting it wrong, law helps nature out by punishing those who are not natural enough and want to put the wrong thing in the wrong place.

The small, intimate society created for intercourse, one time or many, the social unit that is the fuck in action, must be one that protects male dominance. Every man is vulnerable to rebellion, pain, metaphoric castration and real physical anguish, at the point of entry. There is a sudden democracy of vulnerability.
Vulnerable
means “capable of being wounded, ” “defenseless against injury”
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The penis needs the protection of the law, of awe, of power. Rebellion here, in intercourse, is the death of a system of gender hierarchy premised on a sexual victory over the vagina. The triumphant fuck is virtually synonymous with masculinity. The legitimacy of a man’s civil dominance depends on the authenticity of his masculinity, which is articulated when he fucks. Masculinity itself means being as differentiated from women as it is possible to be; and so the laws regulating intercourse in general forbid those sex acts that break down gender barriers and license those sex acts and conditions that heighten gender polarity and antagonism. The laws that say who to fuck, when, how, and anatomically where keep the man differentiated in a way that seems absolute. Having power, one can break the law for pleasure; but the law itself is the mechanism for creating and maintaining power.

Laws create male dominance, and maintain it, as a social environment. Male dominance is the environment we know, in which we must live. It is our air, water, earth. Laws shape our perceptions and knowledge of what male dominance is, of how it works, of what it means to us. Laws shape the experiences we have before we have them. Laws significantly predetermine how we will feel, will understand, what will happen to us in life. Laws establish for humans the terms of our symbiosis with male dominance: what it takes from us to sustain itself as an overall environmental system; what it gives to us to enable us to survive as individual organisms inside it. There is an ecology of male dominance: a complex, delicate, deliberate interaction between it—our rain forest, our desert, our sea—and us, the fragile organisms breathing in and out inside it because of necessity, not choice. On one level, laws are diagrams of that ecology. They show the whole pattern of relations between us, the organisms, and it, the environment. On another level, the more important one, laws are causal, not illustrative. They make us do certain things in certain ways. They keep some people on top and some people on the bottom. They punish those who do not comply. They force compliance in those who do not want to be punished. They produce fear. They create order. In this, their active meaning, laws are instrumental in organizing human energy, creativity, and potential into patterns of actual behavior, including sexual behavior. The purpose of laws on intercourse in a world of male dominance is to promote the power of men over women and to keep women sexually subjugated (accessible) to men. These laws—great and small—work. They work by creating gender itself. They say what a man is in intercourse, in rights, in obligations. They say what a woman is in intercourse, in rights, in obligations. They forbid confusion between male and female. They bifurcate rights, responsibilities, behaviors, so that men and women, in the same place at the same time, remain creatures distinct from each other, strangers, the woman less human than the man, with less dignity and less freedom, with a lower civil status. The laws regulating intercourse are the laws most vital to making gender a social absolute that appears to have a metaphysical base, an inevitability rooted in existence itself. These same laws regulate—put a brake on—the kind of lust produced by male dominance, by having sexual rights over inferiors. They keep men from destroying through self-indulgence a sophisticated system of power that has lasted too long and ruined those who have rebelled against it. “In the city of the world, ” wrote Augustine, “both the rulers themselves and the people they dominate are dominated by the lust for domination. ”
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According to Augustine, the great carnal sins “are hatched from the lust for power, from gratification of the eye, and from gratification of corrupt nature... ”
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A former world-class sinner himself, astute, keenly aware of the intense carnal pleasures of lust and domination, he described the quality of lust produced by the passion for dominance:

Such lust does not merely invade the whole body and outward members: it takes such complete and passionate possession of the whole man, both physically and emotionally, that what results is the keenest of all pleasures on the level of sensation; and, at the crisis of excitement, it practically paralyzes all power of deliberate thought.
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Before the Fall, Augustine wrote, intercourse could take place “without the passion of lust. ”
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God had created male and female; each had an appropriate nature; there were natural, Edenic sex roles in the Garden: “a man and his wife could play their active and passive roles in the drama of conception without the lecherous promptings of lust, with perfect serenity of soul and with no sense of disintegration between body and soul. ”
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An honest sinner and an honest utopian, Augustine stresses the inner peace and human wholeness of an intercourse based on harmony, not lust; and he underscores the alienation and turmoil in intercourse based on the lust for dominance.
Nature, however, is the same in Eden and outside it: a man and his wife; active and passive roles in intercourse; a natural intercourse, even in Eden, of the fucker and the fucked.

Nature in this usage means what God made, his will, his intention; the essence and meaning of creation; what a thing or being is in itself. God made, willed, intended, male and female, active and passive, in intercourse; male dominance without the kick. This is the nature God made. Male dominance has in fact had the cachet of being both natural and divine. Evolutionists, for instance, canned God but not the essential male and female he created and not intercourse as he intended it: male with female; active and passive. They found secular, science-saturated arguments to support the same arrangement of human reality. Even without a belief in God, nature is what God made the way he made it. Crimes against nature, then, have been crimes against God: direct hits on him. Crimes against nature violate
what beings are; for instance, the crime of sodomy violates what men are, their intrinsic nature. As Augustine wrote:

Sins against nature, therefore, like the sin of Sodom, are abominable and deserve punishment wherever and whenever they are committed. If all nations committed them, all alike would be held guilty of the same charge in God’s law, for our Maker did not prescribe that we should use each other in this way. In fact the relationship which we ought to have with God is itself violated when our nature, of which he is the Author, is desecrated by perverted lust.
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The laws regulating intercourse—prescribing how we must use each other (be used) as well as proscribing how we must not use each other—are supposed to protect the authentic natures of men and women. Men being fucked like women moves in an opposite direction; so there is a rule against men being fucked like women. The rules on intercourse are intended to keep people away from the slippery slope God appears to dislike the most: a lessening of differences between the sexes, the conflation of male and female natures into one human nature.

Sodomy, then, a notorious crime against nature, male nature, would appear to be a real threat to male dominance as organized and maintained in the Judeo-Christian system.
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In the Old Testament it is prohibited as a capital crime: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination” (Leviticus 18: 22). “And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them” (Leviticus 20: 13). Adjacent verses also condemn in the same terms a man or a woman having intercourse with an animal, and that too is reckoned to be sodomy. Other capital crimes include adultery and various forms of incest. From the Old Testament to the end of the eighteenth century in Western Europe and the United States, sodomy was criminal, with rare exception a capital crime. The language of Leviticus was lifted, for instance, by Connecticut in its criminal sodomy statute of 1642:

That if any man shall lie with mankind, as he lieth with womankind, both of them have committed abomination; they shall be put to death, except it shall appear that one of the parties was forced or under fifteen years of age...
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Typically in secular law sodomy was characterized as “detestable, ” “abominable, ” “horrible, ” “against nature, ” and, in this superb effort, an 1837 North Carolina statute, “the abominable and detestable crime against nature, not [to] be named among Christians. ”
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The key elements are simple, clear, consistent: against nature, abominable, detestable, lethal. In the nineteenth century, capital punishment was increasingly replaced by imprisonment, often for life, and hard labor as the penalties of choice. The first criminal sodomy statute to be repealed in the United States was repealed by the state of Illinois in 1962.

* See Dworkin, “Jews and Homosexuals, ” pp. 107-146, Right-wing Women (Perigee Books, New York, 1983; The Women’s Press, London, 1983), for discussion of how in ancient Greece sodomy was condoned and used to express male dominance; also for a discussion on the particular vehemence of Christianity against the homosexual.

The concept of a crime against nature, male nature, was so powerful that it resonated beyond the law itself, God’s or man’s. In culture it came to mean that the person who did the act had the nature that was the crime. He was too feminine in a world of real, natural, unpolluted masculinity. Norman Mailer, for instance, combined the best of Leviticus and Proust when he wrote:

Yes, it is the irony of prison life that it is a world where everything is homosexual and yet nowhere is the condition of being a feminine male more despised. It is because one is used, one is a woman without the power to be female, one is fucked without a womb...
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Proust too described the “feminine male” as one who craved masculinity in other men but was despised by them because of his femininity. In his “Cities of the Plain” in
Remembrance of Things Past, Proust said that those who committed the crime of Sodom were men who were women inside; because they were women inside, they wanted, sought, needed, the male member. Ironically (see Mailer above), they are unable to get what they want because they want real men, masculine men, men with the right nature—the so-called deviant himself has an orthodox religious view of that nature, expressed in sexual desire. But any such real man despises the femininity that makes the feminine male want him. Because they cannot have the masculine men they want, the feminine men are forced to buy male prostitutes to enact the sex and the virility they want. They are lonely and in despair; they are

lovers who are almost precluded from the possibility of that love the hope of which gives them the strength to endure so many risks and so much loneliness, since they are enamoured of precisely the type of man who has nothing feminine about him, who is not an invert and consequently cannot love them in return;...
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The “irony” is tragic for Proust. The feminine men are “that race of beings... whose ideal is manly precisely because their temperament is feminine, and who in ordinary life resemble other men in appearance only;... ”
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For Mailer, the dispossession of the men who want men is another occasion on which to extol the joys of impregnating women: